Israel Gutman, who survived the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the Auschwitz death camp and dedicated his life to researching the Holocaust, died Monday (Sept. 30) in Jerusalem, according to The Associated Press. He was 90.

Israel GutmanThe Associated Press

A native of the Polish capital, Mr. Gutman was wounded in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, when a few hundred poorly armed Jews resisted Nazis who were rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps.

His parents and siblings perished in Warsaw, but Mr. Gutman survived incarceration not only in Auschwitz but also in two other concentration camps, The AP said.

After the war, he moved to Israel, where he helped survivors and devoted himself to studying the Holocaust. In 1961, he testified in the trial of Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who had been captured by Mossad agents in Argentina the year before and brought to Jerusalem. Eichmann was convicted and hanged.

Abraham Nemeth, a blind mathematician who developed a Braille system that has helped other blind people develop skills in math and science, died Wednesday (Oct. 2) of congestive heart failure in Southfield, Mich., according to The Washington Post. He was 94.

Although he loved mathematics, he had been discouraged from pursuing that field of study because, people said, he wouldn’t be able to solve equations on a blackboard.

At his wife’s urging, he took math courses and developed his own shorthand for making computations, The Post said.

“I began to improvise Braille symbols and methods which were both effective for my needs and consistent from one course to the next,” he once wrote in an autobiographical essay. “So this was the beginning of the Nemeth Code.”

The Rev. Sidney Lanier, 90, turned his New York City church into a theater

The Rev. Sidney Lanier, who converted his Episcopal church on the fringe of New York City’s theater district into a showplace for new plays and fledgling actors, died Sept. 23 in Santa Barbara, Calif., according to The New York Times. He was 90.

Father Lanier, whose congregation at St. Clement’s had languished in the low double digits, tried to bolster attendance by inviting actors to read Bible passages and great literature.

Then he and two partners tore out the altar and pews to form what became known as the American Place Theater, which became home in the 1970s and 1980s for young playwrights such as Sam Shepard, Terrence McNally, Steve Tesich and David Mamet, as well as theatrical newcomers such as Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Ellen Barkin, Eric Bogosian and Sam Waterston.